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Hancock Public Schools are digging into the numbers–and the trash–to find out how much garbage is being thrown away that could have been recycled.
It’s part of a study spearheaded by the Copper Country Recycling Initiative to teach these middle school students about recycling and to share the data with the state.
Copper Country Recycling Initiative Co-Chair Carol Ekstrom said, “We will send these figures to the DEQ and so they can use them in their reports.”
The students separated the trash and then weighed the amount of recyclables they found thrown away.
13-year-old Kimberly Mackenzie said, “I would definitely rather have a recycling bin next to the garbage can than to just have a garbage can, because that’s a lot of waste just thrown away when it could be in the recycling bin.”
This is the first year that Hancock Schools have had a recycling program and the students will graph their results of this Garbology study.
Hancock Middle School Science Teacher Jen Davis said, “I’m hoping that the students will see that there’s a lot of things that we throw away and we don’t think twice about and there’s things that we could recycle and still reduce our trash here at the school.”
The study may eventually involve as many as eight Copper Country schools participating.
